4 easy ways to use LinkedIn to grow your startup

Most business people know startups have to overcome many challenges and defy the odds to succeed in the marketplace. One of the ways you can get a leg up on competitors is to make your business as visible as possible.

Being involved with a startup business may mean you’re trying to get by on a shoestring budget, which could give you the impression becoming more visible is a nearly impossible task. Fortunately, growing your business and making it clear what you have to offer are both much simpler when using LinkedIn.

1. Get as Many Recommendations as Possible

In the world of LinkedIn, a recommendation could be thought of as currency that relates to your reputation. The more recommendations you have, the more users of the site are likely to see you as a trustworthy person, and someone worth knowing. The easiest way to get recommendations is arguably the most straightforward: Just ask for them.
There are several best practices to follow when requesting a LinkedIn recommendation, but one you should definitely keep in mind is to make it personal. Rather than just using the auto-generated text LinkedIn offers for recommendation requests, personalize your message. Try to ask for a recommendation that somehow relates to what you’re doing through your startup.

2. Make Sure Your Startup Relates to Your Profile

Many LinkedIn users aren’t as diligent as they should be when it comes to keeping their profiles relevant. That could clearly be a disadvantage, especially if the profile is no longer an accurate reflection of what a person has accomplished.

Go through each section of your profile to verify it’s up to date, and determine whether there are relevant ways you can mention your startup in the text. Then, whenever a user visits your profile, he or she should be made well aware of your startup and what makes it special.

Try to organise information in a way so the most crucial information is very prominent. Keith Springer of Springer Financial Advisors does that very well. His current job title is just under his name, so visitors can see at a glance what he does.

Consider taking a similar approach and list your startup’s website and blog on the LinkedIn profile, too. That way, people can learn more about your startup in one click, and don’t even have to navigate away from LinkedIn to reach those new websites.

3. Share Business Blog Posts on LinkedIn

A blog can be a very effective and low-cost marketing tool for your startup. Although it’s necessary to fill it with interesting content that relates to your target audience, you’ll also need to figure out ways to let people know the blog exists. Luckily, LinkedIn can help with that.

There’s a Share on LinkedIn button you can insert within your blog posts by using HTML code. The button allows you to quickly broadcast every post across LinkedIn, which should drastically reduce the time you have to spend promoting posts.

4. Use LinkedIn to Find Talented Employees

Maybe you’re at the point where your startup can’t feasibly grow any more until you bring additional team members on board. Hiring skilled people who are well-suited to your company’s culture can be an arduous task, but it’s often one that can’t be avoided for too long if you’re serious about growth.

You can take advantage of LinkedIn’s powerful search tools to sift through the field of job candidates and find individuals who are well-equipped to potentially work at your startup. After learning your way around the search filters, you may realize it’s much easier to narrow down options by looking at the profiles of people you know on LinkedIn and examining their connections.

For example, maybe you’re in need of someone to handle the copy for your startup’s website that’ll launch within the next six weeks. If you know a best-selling author on LinkedIn who got his start as a copywriter for Amazon, there’s a good chance he probably has some worthy writers in his circle of friends. Those individuals may serve as good leads, even if you don’t go as far as hiring them.

As should be evident from these simple strategies, it doesn’t take a lot of time or tech know-how to tap into LinkedIn for the purposes of helping your startup get bigger. Growing a startup correctly is a careful, methodical process, but it’s one that may become easier if you lean on LinkedIn for support.
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